Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
graphics . An oscilloscope screen comprises many lines of phosphorescent
pixels (dots) that are turned on and off by an electron beam sweeping
across the screen, row by row (or raster by raster to use the more techni-
cal term). The artists would create their works by varying the electrical
inputs to the oscilloscope and twiddling with knobs and buttons to con-
trol the various parameters on the device. The images produced on os-
cilloscope screens were then photographed, creating a permanent record
of the artistic creation.
One of the first computer artists to come to prominence using this
technique was Ben Laposky, an American mathematician and artist whose
first “oscillons” (as he called his works) were created in 1950, while in
Germany, almost simultaneously, Herbert Franke also started producing
works in this art form. The aesthetic appeal of the oscilloscope images lay
in the various shapes and forms that can be created using the many var-
ied functions (or graphs) from different branches of mathematics. True,
these patterns are not original works of art, but they can be employed as
components in new creations and many of them are sufficiently appeal-
ing to stand as works of electronic art in their own right, despite lacking
originality.
In the early 1960s, although computers were available only to a few
people, those interested in their artistic potential had a new toy with
which to create—the digital plotter. This was a device, a kind of elec-
tronic Etch-a-Sketch R machine, 31 that moved a pen across a sheet of pa-
per, raising and lowering the tip of the pen in order to “plot” the desired
image, which was determined by a computer program. Digital plotters
allowed the few computer artists of that era to develop algorithms for
creating line drawings, a process that could take a plotter anything from
a few minutes to several hours.
One of the pioneers in the use of digital computers in the visual arts
was Michael Noll, who created his earliest computer art in 1962 while he
was working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.
In 1964 his program famously employed random numbers to create, on
a microfilm plotter, 32 the drawing Computer Composition With Lines (see
31 Etch-a-Sketch is a registered trademark of the Ohio Art Company.
32 The microfilm plotter was a device incorporating a 35mm camera pointed at the screen of a
cathode ray tube (a similar type of tube to those employed in TV sets and oscilloscopes). The
plotter could draw black and white pictures on the screen, composed of segments of lines, some of
which were connected and some unconnected. These images were photographed by the camera,
which was controlled by the plotter.
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